Yoga has become a widespread practice in recent years and has undoubtedly experienced a vital renaissance with the pandemic, thanks to the physical and mental benefits it brings.
This discipline, which originated in India and is more than 4,000 years old, combines physical practice with meditation to balance body, mind, and emotions, which will give us immense peace. Then, it makes sense that the word yoga, which comes from the Sanskrit root yuj, means “union,” “connection.”
This connection between body and soul is achieved through asanas, a series of more or less complicated postures combined with breathing exercises (or pranayama). There are different types of yoga, but the most practiced in the West is the one that combines physical exercise with breathing and relaxation.
Let’s see the 12 benefits that yoga has for your health:
1. You Will Gain Strength And Muscle
Yoga helps to improve the physical strength of the people who practice it. As you progress in more complicated postures that involve muscle work, you will increase the strength throughout the body, from the feet to the neck. Another added benefit is the relief of muscle tension, as specific exercises induce relaxation.
2. Yoga Helps In Increasing Your Flexibility
Flexibility is key to practicing yoga, but not essential, as this quality develops over time. At first, you will perceive stiffness in your body, but the muscles will tend to stretch little by little, and the joints will have more elasticity. All that is required to acquire flexibility is patience and a lot of practice. In the medium term, we will be rewarded with greater agility and freedom of movement to make our daily lives easier.
3. You Will Improve Your Balance
The third quality that is acquired with yoga is balance. There are postures known as the tree or Vrikshasana, which helps with the body stability and awareness of our body. For this, you need to concentrate on a fixed point, which allows you to control your body on support or those that mark the posture itself. With experience, everything is eventually achieved.
4. You Will Correct Your Posture
Many jobs demand you to sit at a desk for long periods of time. During the pandemic, this problem has worsened due to teleworking, which has taken away even more of the hours of movement that we used to spend going to the office, going out to lunch, etc. As a consequence, back, shoulder, and neck problems arise. The same happens to those who sit behind the wheel all day long. Yoga will help you to correct your posture with asanas such as a tree, sphinx, butterfly, warrior, bridge, sun, bow, or fish, among others.
5. Yoga Helps Reduce Stress And Anxiety
The practice of yoga helps to reduce the stress hormone cortisol and generates endorphins (hormones that bring well-being), so it is a good practice to reduce stress. The study by sociologist Ronald C. Kessler, a professor at Harvard Medical School in Massachusetts, concluded that practicing yoga regularly helps reduce stress and anxiety in the same way that anxiolytics would. It’s all right to try.
Meditation and pranayama exercises also help reduce stress and anxiety. The mind becomes serene and diverts the worries and inner voices that tense and exhaust it.
6. It Will Improve Your Sexual Relations
Yoga contributes to better sex for couples since specific exercises strengthen the pelvic muscles and help to have a better hip opening, both in men and women. Scientific studies show that yoga can treat premature ejaculation with postures such as the Mula Bandha, which strengthens the walls of the rectum, prostate, and sphincters. This asana also benefits women, as it relieves menstrual and labor pains and improves sexual relations. On the other hand, many experts point out that yoga increases libido. Undoubtedly, all this points to greater sexual satisfaction.
7. It Will Help You Avoid Injuries
Yoga is like a vaccine against injuries. If you are an athlete, the most advisable thing to do is stretching after training. Those proposed by yoga are ideal since the improvement of flexibility helps prevent dislocations, sprains, and strains. If you are doing rehabilitation, practicing yoga will favor a faster recovery.
8. Yoga Enhances Blood Circulation
Thanks to the execution of inverted postures (such as the candle or the pine tree) or dynamic yoga, blood circulation and oxygenation at the cellular level are improved, which reaches all the organs of our body. In addition, yoga strengthens the hormonal and lymphatic systems.
9. Yoga Increases Your Concentration Span
With just one session of 20 minutes of yoga a day, the person’s level of concentration increases considerably. But it is not the only improvement; it will also provide greater coordination, reaction time, and memory. The asanas that will help you increase your concentration the most are the eagle, the prayer, warrior 2, the book, and the crow.
10. You Will Feel Younger
We know from many studies that sports helps prevent aging and slows it down since good muscle mass and healthy bones are vital to reaching old age as well as possible. With yoga and meditation, we can also reverse the aging process thanks to its direct action on telomerase, the enzyme that protects the telomeres. When telomeres are shortened, aging comes faster. That is why it is so crucial for telomerase to act and lengthen telomeres, which also means a longer life.
11. You Will Learn To Breathe Well
Breathing techniques or pranayama are divided into abdominal, thoracic, and clavicular breathing. When we manage to perform all of them correctly, we speak of complete breathing.
Breathing in yoga brings us many benefits, such as reducing stress and anxiety, an improvement of tranquility and peace of mind, an increase in lung capacity, better control of emotions, and greater physical endurance.
12. Yoga Helps In Weight Loss
Many have joined yoga to lose weight. It is scientifically proven that doing yoga helps you lose weight. For example, it has been calculated that vinyasa yoga has a caloric expenditure of about 7 kilocalories per minute. If you do one hour of this activity, you will have burned about 507 calories per hour.